Staff FPGA and Embedded Software Engineer

Work Schedule

Standard (Mon-Fri)

Environmental Conditions

Laboratory Setting, Office

Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

How will you make an impact?

We are seeking a hands-on Staff FPGA and Embedded Software Engineer to own FPGA firmware and embedded software for flow cytometry instruments. The role prioritizes sustaining legacy FPGA code and developing reliable real-time acquisition and control. You will translate instrument requirements into maintainable architectures that acquire digitized photodetector signals, process cytometry events, control hardware, and deliver data to instrument software.

You will collaborate with systems, optics, electrical engineers, instrument software, manufacturing, service, and external board-design partners. The successful candidate combines deep FPGA implementation and verification expertise with hardware/software interface skills, and enough schematic literacy to guide requirements, reviews, bring-up, and troubleshooting.

What will you do?

• Sustain, debug, document, and extend production FPGA codebases written in Verilog/SystemVerilog, applying controlled changes that improve reliability, testability, and maintainability.
• Design and implement high-throughput FPGA data acquisition pipelines from ADC interfaces through digital filtering, trigger logic, buffering, and high-speed host interfaces.
• Integrate FPGA firmware with embedded processors and operating environments such as embedded Linux, an RTOS, or bare-metal systems, including low-level interfaces, drivers, and board-support components.
• Implement and troubleshoot common embedded protocols and interfaces, including I2C, SPI, UART, Ethernet.
• Develop verification strategies and automated testbenches
• Define FPGA and embedded-software requirements, data formats, and board-interface specifications; review schematics and layouts and work effectively with internal or third-party board designers.
• Support board bring-up and subsystem validation using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG tools, and software diagnostics; isolate issues across FPGA, processor, board, operating system, application software, and instrument boundaries.
• Support manufacturing, service, and quality teams through root-cause investigations, corrective actions, component obsolescence response, and release of sustaining firmware or software changes.
• Own technical planning, estimates, risks, design tradeoffs, and progress communication while applying appropriate research-use-only requirements.